creative thinking[exercise]

Are you seeing or is your brain deciding what you should see?

Read the following paragraph.

“Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabridge Uinvervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the litteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae.  The rset can be a ttoal mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm.  Tihs is besauae ocne we laren how to raed we bgien to aargnre the lteerts in our mnid to see waht we epxcet to see.  The huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but preecsievs the wrod as a wlohe.  We do tihs ucnsoniuscoly wuithot tuhoght.”

Amazing, isn’t it?  You’re finding meaning in a mass of jumbled letters.   How is this possible?

Think of your mind as a dish of jelly which has settled so that its surface is perfectly flat.  When information enters the mind, it self-organizes.  It is like pouring warm water on the dish of jelly with a teaspoon.  Imagine the warm water being poured on the jelly dish and then gently tipped so that it runs off.  After many repetitions of this process, the surface of the jelly would be full of ruts, indentations, and grooves.

New water (information) would start to automatically flow into the preformed grooves.   After a while, it would take only a bit of information (water) to activate an entire channel. This is the pattern recognition and pattern completion process.  Even if much of the information is out of the channel, the pattern will be activated.  The mind automatically corrects and completes the information to select and activate a pattern.

In our paragraph, your brain takes a bit of information (the first and last letters) and activates the “word” channel and you see and understand the word.  This is why when we sit down and try to will new ideas or solutions, we tend to keep coming up with the same-old, same-old ideas.  Information is flowing down the same ruts and grooves making the same-old connections producing the same old ideas over and over again.

Creativity occurs when we tilt the jelly dish and force the water (information) to flow into new channels and make new connections.  These new connections give you different ways to focus you attention and different ways to interpret whatever you are focusing on.   These different ways of focusing your attention and different ways of interpreting what you are focusing on lead to new insights, original ideas and solutions.